The tributes hailed Smith as a warm and passionate man of blazing wit, a fellow of infinite jest who was always first to the bar on the train back to Scotland after a hard Parliamentary week. This was a deep surprise to most of the nation, since he had always come across as an owlish, lawyerly figure whose main strategy seemed to be to keep the Labour Party from squabbling and wait for the Tories to disembowel themselves. He seemed cleverer than John Major but not fundamentally more thrilling: you might not be surprised to find Mr. Major behind the grille at your suburban bank dishing out the tenners, and Mr. Smith in the paneled back office frowning about your overdraft. This public dourness was apparently deliberate. A Labour MP’s wife, known for her reluctance to humor bores, assured me, “John was very, very funny. If you went to dinner, you knew you were going to have a good time.” So why, I asked her, when most politicians try to make themselves seem more exciting than they are, rather than the reverse, had Smith gone in for this peculiar and chameleonic behavior? “He decided not to be witty in public,” she replied, “because of Kinnock and seeming frivolous.” There was probably some sense in this: wit and spontaneity are tolerated here among effete backbenchers whose chance of real power has gone, but among the higher echelons everything must sound as if it had been triple-drafted by civil servants, spin doctors, and ideological minders. Neil Kinnock, John Smith’s predecessor as leader, once ran into trouble over the Falklands War. He was appearing as a TV panelist, and a member of the audience put it to him that Mrs. Thatcher had displayed “guts” as a politician. He responded, “It is a pity that other people have to leave theirs on the ground in Goose Green in order to prove it.” In the circumstances, this was an excellent reply—sharp, angry, and appropriate—yet Mr. Kinnock discovered that it was not deemed politically acceptable, and shortly thereafter was dispatching letters of explanation and regret to Falklands widows. John Smith was unlikely to make mistakes of this order: a Scottish Presbyterian lawyer who scared neither middle England nor the City, he was par excellence a safe pair of hands.
The catcher’s mitt has now passed to the youngest-ever leader of the Labour Party. Tony Blair is forty-one, has been a Member of Parliament only since 1983, and is still young enough (or well enough briefed) to be able, when interviewed by a Radio 1 disc jockey, to cite numerous different rock groups whose music he fancies. He grew up in Durham, went to Fettes public school in Edinburgh, and then to St. John’s College, Oxford. Here he sang and played guitar in a band called Ugly Rumours; more significantly, he converted to both Christianity and socialism. In London, he joined the Labour Party and became a barrister; he met his barrister wife in the same set of chambers. In 1982, he fought the parodically unwinnable Tory seat of Beaconsfield in a by-election; then, thanks to a mixture of good fortune and personal persuasiveness, landed the safe Labour constituency of Sedgefield, in County Durham. His career so far has featured luck and timing as well as good judgment. But he was also singled out early as a rising talent by the Labour hierarchs, and as a rising danger by the Conservatives. Most people I spoke to about Tony Blair—even a sleepy House of Commons porter—assured me that they had picked him as a future leader from the beginning.
It was frequently asserted during the leadership election (in which Mr. Blair defeated two rivals with just about the right degree of emphasis—handsome but not humiliating) that one of his key political virtues is his appeal to the Southeast. By “the Southeast” we are to understand those key voters, from the skilled working class and middle management, who defected to Mrs. Thatcher and stayed with Mr. Major. This assessment is probably correct, though the new leader is hardly repugnant to the North: a Durham childhood, a Scottish schooling, a Durham constituency, and, as a clincher, the fact that his wife was the stepdaughter of the actress Pat Phoenix, who for many years played the regal role of Elsie Tanner in Coronation Street, the long-running TV soap about Northern working-class life. This is indirect yet unarguable pedigree, rather like the Royal Family being related to Barbara Cartland.
Another part of his pedigree is equally interesting, and had been unknown even to Mr. Blair himself until the journos started trampling over his life. The Daily Mail acting no doubt in the public interest, and surely without any hope that it might turn up an embarrassing secret, commissioned genealogical research into the Blair family. It had frequently been reported that the new leader’s paternal grandfather was a rigger in the Govan shipyard by the name of William Blair. This added useful proletarian authenticity, given that Tony’s father, Leo, was not only an academic but a lifelong Conservative and convinced Thatcherite. The investigation discovered, however, that Leo’s true parents were not the Blairs but a pair of music-hall performers named Charles Parsons and Cecilia Ridgeway; they had been on a Northern tour at the time of Leo’s birth, and put him out to board with a Mr. and Mrs. Blair. The distant tang of illegitimacy is scarcely scandalous; more to the point is the extraordinary coincidence that both the present Prime Minister (son of the artiste Tom Ball) and the present Leader of the Opposition have music-hall blood in their veins. That they should end up heading their parties in the House of Commons seems Lamarckian: positive proof of the inheritance of acquired characteristics.
Most echelons of the press also went on the trawl for the personal stuff In this they have so far been disappointed: Ugly Rumours has proved no more than the name of a band. For instance, Mr. Blair must be the only student rocker in the entire 1970s who never took drugs. What’s wrong with the University of Oxford? President Clin ton went there and failed to inhale; Tony Blair didn’t even touch his fingers to the smoldering sin. As one of his Oxford contemporaries put it, “Listen, I would know, and the answer is definitely no. Unlike most of us, the guy hardly ever drank.” Whaaat? And then there is the other thing, the thing that people, especially young people, tend to do when left alone in pairs; but even here it seems that the state troopers will not be called in evidence. At Oxford, according to The Independent on Sunday, the consensus was that Tony did not “get laid.” Unbelievable: you’d think the fellow was running for the See of Canterbury. On the other hand, this is probably just as well, since the insertion of overt ethical content into British politics—such as Mr. Blair has done in recent weeks—normally leads to self-slaughter. No sooner had the Tories launched their “Back to Basics” campaign last year than it emerged that numerous Tory MPs had been getting back, or up, to some pretty basic things themselves. Does Mr. Blair have any sinister, or even ordinary, peculiarities? Well, I can add one speck to the dunghill of data currently accumulating, which may or may not be indicative. Anthony Howard, the seasoned political observer and former editor of The New Statesman, reported to me in awed tones this action-man detail: “He is the fastest eater I’ve ever come across. I mean, I’m a quick eater, but I was only halfway through my liver and he’d cleaned his plate!”
Mr. Blair’s victory was a success for those in the Labour Party currently called “modernizers.” Political struggles are in part struggles of nomenclature: pin the best label on your own chest, and slap the worst on your opponent’s back, preferably at a place where the knife goes in the most easily. In the Tory Party there was the enduring scuffle between “wets” and “dries” (which has elided into one between “consolidators” and “radicals”). In the Labour Party for a long time it was “moderates” versus “militants” (which some arrant compromisers tried to solve linguistically, by calling themselves “militant moderates”). More recently, it has been “modernizers” versus “traditionalists.” The modernizers sought, apart from anything else, to make Labour electable again: this involved smartening the Party up, democratizing its electoral systems, reducing the influence of the trade unions, and accepting a certain amount of market reality. Such activities are regarded by some as classic right-wing middle-class treachery. During the leadership election the far left in the constituencies wittily dubbed Blair “the liquidationist candidate,” and the depths of suspicion with which the modernizers are viewed can be judged by
this recent remark from the veteran gauchiste Tony Benn: “If you look at apartheid in South Africa, it didn’t end because Nelson Mandela had a pink rose, a new suit, a policy review, and Saatchi & Saatchi.” However, the modernizers have not only the ascendancy but also the better label. “The traditionalists hate being called traditionalists,” I was told by one Westminster correspondent. And they won’t even be allowed to call themselves left-wing for much longer if the nameplate stealing continues. Here is Tony Blair during the run-up to the election: “Many of those that call themselves left aren’t on the left at all if left means radical. They simply represent a kind of conservatism.”
Thus is the old left neutered with words. For the modernizers, musty, prelapsarian socialism is dead. And such is their confidence that they are now even reclaiming the very word socialism. It used to be a bogey term, and failed to appear in the 1992 Labour manifesto, presumably on the ground that it was deemed to induce projectile vomiting among the Don’t-Knows. It is now coming back into shy usage again, purged of its old associations like a paint-thickened door plunged into an acid bath and coming out all shiny new pine. In Tony Blair’s words, from a campaign speech in Cardiff: “The essential belief is that a strong united society is necessary to individual achievement. That is why we call it socialism.” Mr. Blair even published a Fabian Society pamphlet, timed to coincide with his election, boldly entitled “Socialism.” His socialism, or, to insert its occasional and diluting hyphen, socialism, is not that of the command economy, class warfare, and public ownership, but rather that of state partnership and gentle interventionism, fostered by those “notions associated with the left-social justice, cohesion, equality of opportunity, and community.”
Tony Blair’s acceptance speech was not one of those occasions on which you announce policy; rather, it was a time for showing yourself to the people and playing your theme song. Mr. Blair did this very well. He is not a great orator, though in opposing Mr. Major he does not need to be: he is already Demosthenes to a speak-your-weight machine. And, in any case, orating simultaneously to a crowded hall and a television camera is probably an impossible job; like being a stage and TV actor at the same time. But he seemed seriously pleased, sufficiently moved to leave a tremor in his voice, and he spoke with the sort of zeal that makes average viewers slightly embarrassed if they do not feel quite the same zeal themselves. (This is no bad thing, since not every benefit brought into the world comes through virtue and probity; guilt and hypocrisy also get things done.) Mr. Blairs theme song, like all theme songs, consists not so much of sound bites as word bites, and his speech would not be greatly betrayed by simply playing the highlighted words in the order he used them: “Responsibility/trust/trust/service/dedication/dignity/pride/trust
/mission/renewal/mission/hope/change/responsibility/mission/
spirit/community/community/pride/pride/socialism/change/
wrong/right/wrong/right/wrong/right/communities/passion/
reason/change/change/change/solidarity/community/anew/
afresh/inspire/crusade/change/progress/faith/seive/serve/serve.”
A few days later, I found myself in the Shadow Cabinet room at the House of Commons awaiting an audience with the new leader. It is a high-ceilinged, rather gloomy office overlooking the north end of Westminster Bridge, and it was in end-of-term disarray: the conference table snapped apart at its join, the heavy green-leather chairs stacked higgledy-piggledy. Two things stood out in this somber space: the elegant brass door hinges by Pugin, and a volume bound in bright scarlet leather lying next to Mr. Blair’s abandoned jacket. Aha, I thought, let’s check out the browsing material he keeps for those quiet moments between interviews. It was a copy of the New Testament. A sea mist of agnostic dismay descended on me; I mean, I knew the fellow was a serious Christian and all that, but this was taking it a bit far. He’ll be turning the money changers out of Westminster next Then my thumb loosed the title page to disclose a pasted-in presentation slip, dated and signed by Tony Newton, Leader of the House of Commons. Mr. Blair, it appeared, had been to see the Queen that afternoon, and this was his school prize for having been made a member of the Privy Council. I confess to a certain relief at this point.
“You’ll find him very charming,” people had said beforehand; and, yes, this was the case. During the campaign he had been stuck with the pretty-boy tag by various ill-wishers; he is not as good-looking as this suggests, though of course in the context of the House of Commons he is incredibly good-looking. There is a relaxed thoughtfulness about him, plus at times the wary air of one who has just had to cram for examinations in subjects he didn’t know he was going to be tested on for years to come. But then Smith’s death and his own sudden apotheosis had come in a dizzying rush.
Given that Mr. Blair is fluent, telegenic, and young, the first line of attack is to accuse him of lacking ideas. Anthony Howard once watched him address a meeting of the political pressure group Charter 88: “He absolutely charmed them, but he didn’t say a chipolata sausage.” Of course, it’s not essential for politicians to have ideas, and sometimes they may be liked specifically for not having any. This was certainly the case with John Major when he took over from Mrs. Thatcher: he was seen as a decent, middling chap whose decency would do service for positive thought. This is probably still part of Mr. Major’s dwindling allure, since on the only two occasions that he has visibly lapsed into having an idea, or a powerful belief, or at least a personal view that doesn’t come with the official limo, he has made himself look ridiculous. Early in his Premiership, he made an impassioned plea for more motorway toilets; for this cross-legged moan he was treated with wry compassion. More recently, however, Mr. Major came up with a second idea: that vagrancy should be denounced. Begging, he told a Bristol newspaper in May, was an “eyesore,” and maximum legal penalties should be enforced against those who extended the cupped paw: “It is an offensive thing to beg. It is unnecessary. So I think people should be very rigorous with it.” Even if Mr. Major was at the time trying to woo the Tory right for the European elections, this was a doubly inept piece of politics. First, because everyone who lives in a city knows that begging has greatly increased during the lifetime of the present administration. Second, because Mr. Major’s sudden expertise in the matter of down-and-outs left him wide open to the obvious riposte: that it takes one to know one.
But in a wider context a Conservative attack on Mr. Blair for lacking ideas would have its ironic side. The Conservatives are still eking out the brainpan that they came in with fifteen years ago. And as the Thatcherite impetus dribbles away, Thatcherite “ideas” become ever wackier. In April, for instance, the Adam Smith Institute, a think tank of the Conservative right, produced its vision of Britain in the year 2020 (a vision predicated, it goes without saying, on the continuation of Tory rule until then). The institute has been going since 1977, and as its director, Dr. Madsen Pirie, said a few years ago, “We propose things which people regard as on the edge of lunacy. The next thing you know, they’re on the edge of policy.” Dr. Pirie has himself invented the Pirie knot, a cure for men whose bow ties humiliatingly detumesce to a level below the horizontal. “With the conventional knot,” he explains, “you don’t know until you’ve finished tying it how it’s going to come out. I tie a layered knot, constructed systematically so that you get it right every time.”
20–20 Vision: Targets for Britain’s Future is the published attempt of Dr. Pirie and twenty-five co-thinkers to do for Britain what the director has already done for the bow tie. By the end of the next quarter century, a reknotted nation would, if all went well, be able to gaze out upon the following things: a basic rate of income tax at 10 percent, with a top rate at 20 percent; a growth rate which doubles the standard of living every twenty years (“this is very high by the standards of the Twentieth Century, but it was a century which taught us many mistakes to avoid”); elimination of most major illnesses; legitimation of the “black” economy; renovation of all housing stock; privatized motorwa
ys with electronic pricing, guided buses with regenerative braking systems, and the extinction of auto crime (a felony in which Britain is currently the European leader); nursery education for all at three, and foreign-language learning for all at five; an end to homelessness (“We should bear in mind the image which Britain presents to foreign visitors when they see people sleeping in shop doorways and begging on the streets”—so that’s where John Major got his “idea”); life expectancy of a hundred; the restoration of English wild-flower meadows and the fresh glory of “prairie acres covered by exotic crops of lupins;” the reforestation of Britain, raising its wooded proportion from 5 percent to 65 percent; and finally, the reintroduction into this cheap, safe, healthy, newly fronded environment of bears, wolves, and beavers.
One of the key moments for those who endured, rather than en joyed, the Thatcher years came when the Prime Minister, late in her reign, explained to a women’s magazine that “there is no such thing as society.” It was like being in one of those dragging dreams of irrational persecution, from which you seem unable to wake, when your tormentor finally turns to you and says, “But can’t you see, it’s because you’re wearing a white shirt and carrying a newspaper.” Oh, now I understand, you reflect to yourself in your new unconscious wisdom. I thought you were persecuting me because you were mad, and of course you are still mad, indeed even madder than I thought before, but at least I can follow what it is you thought you might have been up to.
Most people, of course, tend to believe that there is such a thing as society, and Blairism is in part a direct riposte to that Thatcherian negative. His is an ethical socialism, out of R. H. Tawney and Archbishop Temple, based on the necessity of communal action if the individual life is to have its best chance of fulfillment. “The power of all… used for the good of each,” as Blair put it in his acceptance speech. “That is what socialism means to me.” It still, of course, means something different to the traditionalists in his party. As one left-wing MP privately put it, “If you tried supporting the 1945 Labour manifesto today, you’d be thrown out of the Party as a Trotskyist.”